Results tagged “teamamerica”

After twelve years, 5,124 performances and a haul of $280 million, Rent's Broadway run has come to an end. The musical closed yesterday after a final sold-out performance packed with diehard fans (the "Rentheads") and a smattering of celebrities (a couple Gossip Girl cast members). Just before the curtain came down for the final time, members of the show's original company joined the current cast on stage to "Seasons of Love," one of the show's most famous songs, the Associated Press reports.

RENT, the surprise smash hit musical that premiered in 1996 and went on to become the seventh-longest-running Broadway show in history, will close June 1st, producers have announced. Over the years the show cultivated a fanatical army of young repeat viewers (“Rentheads”) whose ardor has translated into profits of $280 million on Broadway, four Tony awards and a Pulitzer. Productions have been mounted on six continents, while an ill-conceived movie version of the show, filmed in San Francisco, opened in 2005 to widespread derision. And the musical was also famously parodied by the South Park creators in their film Team America, which depicts the faux-hip cast of the Broadway show LEASE belting the show’s climactic chorus, “Everyone has AIDS!”

MOVIE: Guess it's only fitting that Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America play somewhere tonight. This Bushwick theater is new and on an outdoor rooftop -- so check the sky before you head out. If it's all clear, get ready for food from their grill, drinks from their bar and the wind in your hair.

Oh, to be a child again! The NY Times has a story about the city's efforts to develop a new playground concept for lower Manhattan. The city has been working with designer David Rockwell on a playground that would include things like foam blocks, water, cardboard tubes, burlap bags, ramps, climbing nets and even "play workers" to help kids, uh, play.

Developers of the Lower Manhattan project envision groups of children collaborating, for instance, loading containers with sand, hoisting them up with pulleys and then lowering them down to wagons waiting to be wheeled off to another part of the park.

Continue reading "Innovative Playground Ideas for NYC "

Gersh Kuntzman and Marc Dinkin, Creators of SUV: The Musical!

Gothamist is excited about Team America, the marionette movie from Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park that will spoof both left and right wing Americans, as well as world leaders in rude and hilarious fashion (purposefully bad accents for Kim Jong Il, for starters, let alone the marionette sex issue). But we don't know exactly why composer Marc Shaiman left the film Or that's what we thought we heard. Marc, a film and musical composer (he won a Tony for Hairspray and kissed his partner on live TV), was working on Team America and actually was blogging about working on the film's score. It's not up anymore, but Gothamist had the foresight (okay, we were going to do a post ages ago but never got around to it) to copy one entry:

But on TEAM AMERICA, I finally got them to write MY titles on the music, so, taking important lines of dialogue from the movie, I had the joy of watching these virtuosic musicians see they were playing a piece of music entitled "SURPRISE, COCK FAGS!" or "HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A MAN EAT HIS OWN HEAD?" some bowed their heads in shame, while others played with a brand new intensity!! On this score, I have gotten to write a much more muscular score than I am usually given the opportunity to do. And none of the usual kooky comedy flourishes. There has not been one measure of pixilated pizzicato strings or wacky woodwind passages. Oh no, it's all low brass and blaring horns here today. And banging ethnic and techno drums. And even better, NO PRODUCER or DIRECTOR!! They're too busy elsewhere!! Whheeeeeee!!!!

So there is a Thunderbirds movie being filmed. But it's live-action, not marionette-style the way the original Thunderbirds was. Enter our favorite provocateurs, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park. Variety announced that Scott Rudin will be producing the Stone-Parker take on marionette-driven filmmaking with "Team America." Stone says, "I hate all these new Hollywood films that are CGI-driven. Trey and I loved that 'Thunderbirds' series because of the artistry of the marionettes. It's amazing that a studio would make a movie out of it and take out the only thing that was good about the series."